Content area
Full Text
The challenge to provide equitable opportunities for college students to succeed is a critical priority for the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). In 2014, AAC&U partnered with the Transparency in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (TILT Higher Ed) project, founded at the University of Illinois and now housed at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on an initiative that significantly increases underserved college students' success. TG Philanthropy funded the Transparency and Problem-Centered Learning project (www.aacu. org/problemcenteredlearning), with Tia McNair, Ashley Finley, and Mary-Ann Winkelmes as the coinvestigators. In its first year, the endeavor has identified a simple, replicable teaching intervention that demonstrably enhances students' success, especially that of first-generation, low-income, and underrepresented college students in multiple ways at statistically significant levels, with a medium to large magnitude of effect. These results offer implications for how faculty can help their institutions to right the inequities in college students' educational experiences across the country.
The Project's Problem and Research Question
While federal and state initiatives focused on tuition relief are providing greater access to higher education, they do not guarantee equity of educational experience. Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Pacific Islander students are about half as likely to complete a four-year college degree as their white and Asian classmates (US Department of Education 2014). Completion rates for low-income students lag far behind those of students whose family incomes are above the bottom quartile (Tough 2014). And firstgeneration college students are 51 percent less likely to graduate in four years than students whose parents completed college (Ishitani 2006).
Colleges and universities have of course made valuable efforts to address these skewed and inequitable outcomes, relying upon predictive analytics and resources including advising, scholarships, tutoring, and community-building programs. But there has been little systematic study of the role that faculty can play collectively in improving learning outcomes and success for underserved students. The Transparency and Problem-Centered Learning project aimed to complement existing student support efforts by training faculty and instructors to implement a teaching intervention that showed promise for increasing underserved students' success, and to research the impact of the intervention on students' learning experiences.
The project's basic research question in the 2014-2015 academic year was: What is the effect when teachers provide two transparendy designed,...